>> Friday, January 24, 2014

Last year I was on the organizing committee for a one day workshop on release engineering in San Francisco as part of ICSE. We had so much positive feedback that we have organized another one this year. This year's workshop will be held on April 11, at Google in Mountain
View, California. If you are interested in submitting a talk or paper,
the deadline for the CFP is February 28. More details on the website.

Here's what people liked about last year's workshop

"Brought release engineers together in the same room! So awesome. Great
talks and interaction between researchers and practitioners."

"The information sharing and the candidness of the speakers with their organizational challenges."

"Overall, I loved this opportunity and you all did a wonderful job putting this on. THANK YOU!"

"Specific stories of how some companies improved their release
engineering. Being able to network and ask questions of presenters and
people working on the same problem domain."

"The huge variation in scale that things are being done across the industry. "

As was the case last year, there will be both release engineers and researchers in attendance. This should generate a lot of interesting discussions as we talk about how we have succeeded and failed in building, deploying and testing software often at a large scale and what further research is needed. But if you work at a small company too we would love to hear your stories too. One note of feedback that we received last year was that people would like to hear from a variety of companies, not just large ones.

In parallel to the workshop, a call will be launched for the first ever IEEE Software Special Issue on Release Engineering. So submit a talk or paper, polish it with feedback from the workshop, and submit it to the special issue for possible publication.

I'm happy to help if you have any questions regarding the submission process or the workshop in general. Please feel free to drop me a line (I'm kmoir and
I work at mozilla dot com).

As an aside, there is another release engineering event as part of Usenix on June 20 in Philadelphia with an open CFP too. As Dinah McNutt, the organizer of this event remarked to me "It's going to be a great year to be a release engineer".